Das Holzschiff

River without Banks #1

by Hans Henny Jahnn

Das Holzschiff ist ein Roman von Hans Henny Jahnn und der erste Band der Trilogie Fluss ohne Ufer, des Hauptwerks des Schriftstellers.

Genres: Fiction, Germany, Literature, German Literature, Novels, Modern

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Hans Henny Jahnn (17 December 1894, Stellingen – 29 November 1959, Hamburg) was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder.
As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1917), which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III (1922; "equally lurid"); and a version of Medea (1926). Later works include the novel Perrudja, an unfinished trilogy of novels River without Banks (Fluss ohne Ufer), the drama Thomas Chatterton (1955; staged by Gustaf Gründgens in 1956),[1] and the novella The Night of Lead. Erwin Piscator staged Jahnn's The Dusty Rainbow (Der staubige Regenbogen) in 1961.
Jahnn was also a music publisher, focusing on 17th-century organ music. He was a contemporary of organ-builder Rudolf von Beckerath.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither…” Job 1:21
If Franz Kafka had written a mystery The Ship would’ve been the one…

As if it had come in out of the fog, the ship became suddenly visible. The bow was broad, yellow-brown, and pitch-jointed; the masts were perfectly aligned; so were the projecting yardarms, and the network of shrouds and rigging. The red sails were furled and roped to the yards. Two small tugs, attached to the ship by towlines fore and aft, brought her alongside the quay.

The ship is loaded and departs… But everything is drowning in uncertainty… The ship carries an unidentified cargo and it sails to the unknown port of call… And reality is blurry like on the watercolour that was caught in the drizzle. And the past is an insect captured in a chunk of amber. And everything is laden with existential symbols and signs.

Repose is a greater consolation than motion, and only the vitality of youth enjoys the uproar of everyday life. A young man has very little use for gradual growth, and the secrets of spring remain unrevealed because it is his season. He sees only the burgeoning of desire and its semblances, not the dying fires of a god, bruised by the torment of creation. And not the goal – golden autumn.

Human being is a ship that sails across the ocean of life carrying an identified cargo of one’s soul to the destination unknown.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man is born with a demand for justice, as he understands it. Since his demand remains unfulfilled, a broad understanding of the arbitrary course of events gradually begins to develop in him. He makes the decisions of others his own. He hardens his thoughts to inflexible ideas and consoles his inner powers with a later or a beyond.

Experience, given the capricious and incomprehensible forces of the universe, can only lead to the subordination of certainties and logic to an unremitting irrational unknown. Or so seems to one of the themes of terribly under-known (and under-translated) German expressionist writer Hans Henny Jahnn. The Ship, actually prologue and first volume to an incomplete trilogy, is a kind of metaphysical horror story on an inscrutable mystery ship. It is fantastic.

The lights were on in the great sky dome, flickering in infinite space. Their cold glow, uplifting the heart or destroying it, conveyed the deceptive marvel of edifying ideas. Millions of human beings—and who knows if the animals don’t do the same thing—look up at the night with uncomprehending eyes and turn inward to a forlorn or frightened breast, their own. They see themselves as chosen or rejected. Or what is far away is as far away for them as it pretends to be. It does not penetrate the miasma of their martyred blood. And then again storms spread their noise across the vapors of the earth. Now it was the gleaming dew of loneliness that trickled down upon it.

Besides just the sheer tension and beauty of Jahnn's writing, he makes use of a terribly interesting inter-cutting technique, where, as in experimental film, non-narrative images intrude upon the story to heighten mood or impressionistically explain a state of mind. In a virtuouso passage, a character comes to a long-sought realization, then immediately regrets knowledge as less desirable to his prior uncertainty. But instead of saying that outright, Jahnn gives us this:

The next few seconds brought with them the cruel end of a long uncertainty. A human being feels his way through a dark tunnel. Here and there, his hands grasp the uneven stones, his feet stumble over rocks, he bends low because he is afraid he will hit his head. The darkness of granite differs not at all from the darkness of an unlighted room, so a wanderer can feel hemmed in even in a vast cavern. The wreckage of a petrified night towers over him. But suddenly, far away, light penetrates through a crack. He who was blind a moment ago hurries towards it, his heart pounding with jubilation in his breast. Freedom, the visibility of things, is beckoning to him. Breathless, he steps out into a landscape. And it is as if he were enjoying the sun for the first time. The earth smells spicy of grass and wood, of acrid smoke, of minerals, because a ball of fire is bestowing its warmth. Animals at the wanderer’s feet, farther away—insets, field mice, two hopping rabbits. Near a hill—two horses harnessed to a plow, all coaxed out of a warm oven, all born of a living mother, nothing that can offend the eye or frighten him. Then, suddenly, like a single flash of lightning, the firmament is torn to shreds. Blackness screams out of the breach. Outer space, with its infinite cold, comes rolling in relentlessly. The sea of light dries up. The soul falls off the earth and sees death.

Because of this sort of thing, The Ship tends to require attentive reading to avoid disorientation (except where the utter dislocation seems intended), but is all the richer and more rewarding for it. And though the philosophical passages can meander a bit, they also help to coil the story with forces on the verge of explosion. Forces that must, of course, find a way out before the finish. This even finds a way to elegantly preclude The Vanishing in a single scene.

I transcribed many more passages here, which actually was quite useful in digesting them.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The protracted launch of a mysterious ship slowly transforms into the case of a missing young woman—the ship captain's daughter Ellana—whose fiance Gustave has remained on board as a stowaway. A prime suspect is the shadowy figure of George Lauffer, the so-called 'supercargo', aka the gray man, who has been placed in charge of the ship's unknown cargo. In the person of Lauffer we witness a man whose severe, stoic appearance and bearing conflicts with his tormented inner life. Here is a person whose frothing passion yearns to burst forth yet remains tightly dammed up, only occasionally leaking out in inappropriate streams. Part of the suspense of the novel hinges on the nebulous nature of Lauffer's relationship with Ellana. Entwined with this is the mystery of the strange cargo stowed below decks, carefully protected by Lauffer, and about which sordid rumors begin to spread among the crew.

The Ship offers an engrossing narrative sprinkled with aphorisms and punctuated by more reflective segments typically focused inwardly on specific characters. Jahnn's expressionist leanings are fully on display here, as he plunges forth into the hearts of his characters and wrings out their most hidden sins, desires, pain, longing, and guilt. His familiar fixation on death mingled with eroticism plays out well in the long form, particularly as the narrative shifts into Gustave's desperate search for Ellana, exploring unknown, cryptic spaces within the ship and experiencing subsequent disorientation, much akin to Matthieu's experience in Jahnn's novella The Night of Lead.

Maritime journeys lend themselves well to tales of descent into madness and confrontation with the horror within. This is the third novel I've read this year featuring such harrowing adventures. In one of the others, Lucius Shepard's Viator, the ship in question wasn't even seaworthy, and was in fact occupied by a crew ostensibly evaluating its potential for salvage. If anything, this underscores the fact that it is just as much the physical structure and restricted spatial nature of a ship as it is the fact of being at sea that can lead a crew to the brink of insanity.

This was close to a 5-star book for me, but I found the ending somewhat dissatisfying, so it's really more like a 4.5. It's the most compelling of Jahnn's work that I've read at this point (with The Night of Lead a close second), and I continue to hope for more of his writing to see English translation.

[Feliks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though a slim novel it is extremely finely-crafted in its prose. Without a doubt this is one of the oddest novels you will ever encounter.

The 'surface premise' is highly intriguing, inventive, and startling in the way that so many of these German expressionist & French surrealist projects are. It is part horror story; part suspense; part Gothic romance. There are touches of espionage and adventure. There are unidentifiable elements of sexual perversion.

Yet as weird as it is; all this sham-storytelling is --in so many ways--divorced from the true content of the book. Yes, there is a sea voyage...but it almost has nothing at all to do with what the author has on his mind. It might just be a memory or a dream. It might be a voyage of a dust mote across a cup of tea.

There is a ship; perhaps...but then again maybe there is no ship. It might just be a ship contained in a glob of crystallized amber resting on a mantelpiece. This is not to say that the author takes any cheap shortcuts (a la 'it was all a dream') but the origami-like edges of his descriptions are so 'folded over-into-themselves'...you really can't be sure what you're actually reading.

What you detect instead is that an enormous flood of musings, associations, asides, and insights are channeled toward you, the reader. Every few sentences, there is an allusion, an image, a symbol, a paradox pointed out...something...you may find it maddening.

The amazing thing is that this cataract of aphorisms and maxims are not "unrelated" to the story; that would merely be poor authorship. Instead, all this mental detritus does somehow complement the narrative, flatter it...the churning flotsam'n'jetsam exhumes and explicates the tale; warps and twists it into something else altogether. I'm not sure exactly how it's done, because the inventiveness needed to accomplish this would be incredible. But Jahnn does it. He isn't freewheeling, either: everything here is purposeful.

The characters: [a sea captain; his daughter; her fiancee; a pervert ship's cook, a criminal ship's carpenter, and a tall, gaunt, cargo master] are all lost within an insane ship (a ship which perhaps isn't quite a ship at all) in a sea yarn (which isn't a sea yarn at all) and they are also lost within themselves and maybe even lost within the mind of the man who composed the book.

But for all the surface-oddness of all these figurines, they are still merely mouthpieces. They are but odd, contrived little skeins and shells for the author's ulterior purposes. They babble; they speechify; they confess to one another; they accuse one another of crimes; they quote poetry and spin yarns.

They engage in Socratic dialogs and metaphysical dialectics. But what is surprising is that all the characters' urgent gibberish seems --just as in a nightmare--progressively excruciating and feverish. There seems to be lives at stake; souls facing damnation; spies awaiting interrogation, zealots awaiting Inquisition, revanchists awaiting deportation...

Truly: who is this author Jahnn? Why is he not more known? Can you imagine two more books just like this? His planned trilogy never got that far, unfortunately. But this lone example of what he intended, certainly stands by itself. In a space of its own.

It reads as if written by a prison inmate emerging into the night air after having been locked away for yrs without pen or paper. Jahnn essentially bursts out the door and races across these 200 pages with machine-gun salvos of his own thoughts and paradoxes. He tosses plot aside as he hurtles away, higgeldy-piggeldy, across the countryside.

The result is a book which could stand many re-readings. In just one page you see at least 5+ eminently quotable visions, hallucinations, and jabberings. (Someone needs to start plucking these gems out and dispersing them for the rest of us).

The chief quality which recommends this book is that it is a novel of IDEAS. It is challenging. It is calisthenics for your brain; it protests against reality. This is simply something you don't see in the modern age of cheap, safe, marketable, strained-carrots entertainment. This is a real book written back when men used to actively seek out the farthest limits of thought.

[knig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Already I am at a disadvantage: Jahnns is from a shipbuilding family, so he is in the know. I am oblivious to all maritime references, lores, symbols and sayings, bar one: when the eponymous ship sinks and the unexpected and hitherto unseen figurehead of Venus Anadyomene flashes across the horizon, I’m in on the joke.

The ship, then carries an unidentified cargo to an unknown destination. Amongst a mutinous crew, fuelled by ancient superstitions and prejudices, a quartet of protagonists clash and disengage with alacrity: Ships Captain, his daughter, daughter’s fiancé and the supercargo: a mysterious ‘gray man’ beset with existential angst. The main character, though, is always the ship.

Now, the mesh up: the ship, with its many traps, secret passages, hidden nooks and crannies, seems to swallow up people periodically and permanently. Organic in nature (not unlike Farscape, god I loved that quirky little Australian series), it remains unknowable, mythical, irrational. Contrast the quartet: in search of the rational, their voices turn didactic, I am reminded of Galileo’s Dialogue (concerning the world’s two chief systems): Salviati and Sagredo not being real people but conduits of ideas. This is how Jahnn’s characters portray for the most part: vehicles for long winded musings on the the assimilability of life and reason.

The secondary characters (the crew) augment the core nicely but adding on additional layers of folklore and superstition. A pyramid hierarchy of purpose materialises: the quartet at the top, vain for reason, foundering in their quest, the tip of the iceberg. Below, the crew provides a nebulous cushion of irrational fears and finally, the ship, a colossus of the unknowable.

The final showdown: what happens when an unstoppable force collides with an unmovable object? Quartet’s reason and ships non reason collide as each seeks to destroy the other (albeit the ship is fighting back only metaphorically). Any survivors to be deemed Pyrrhic.

A difficult read.

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few of Jahnn's writings have been translated into English. Fewer of them have stayed in print. "The Ship" is demanding, aggressive and unsettling. For every sentence of actual happening there are three pages of obsessive thought and speculation pervaded by the Expressionist's fixation on despair, decomposition and fear. Everything is psychologized to an attenuated, untrustworthy degree that would verge on madness if the circumstances of the book weren't a suitable justification for the breakdown of the central individuals and the collective.

The plotted outline of the book would fill little more than a page. A ship with disturbingly complicated and secret-filled naval architecture sails towards an undisclosed location freighted with taboo cargo in impenetrable, coffin shaped boxes. These are overseen by a protective and suspicious government agent (referred to as the “supercargo”) who uses the ship to monitor the behavior of all passengers and crew. The captain brings his daughter along for the ride; the fiancée stows away, is immediately discovered and accepted as a passenger and then everything starts to go slowly wrong.

The supercargo and the stowaway receive the most narrative attention as the former is undone by the mistrust and hatred of the crew and the latter is discomposed by circumstances involving his fiancée and his somewhat mutinous interactions with the less well educated crew, who are tasked with representing the herd.

I had the feeling, throughout, that I was meant to chart some sort of psychological schema wherein someone represented the ego and someone represented the id or someone represented an archetype or an ideal or a failing. I no longer subject either books or myself to “readings” of this variety. But I also suspect that there is a good chance that, at the end of such an effort, you’d find the author smiling at you through the shambles of a decoy.

The prose itself is sufficiently rewarding to justify a reading that is not focused on solving riddles or discerning the fine points of Jahnn’s critical intent. Like Gustav Meyrink, Jahnn has a bleached, moonlit, semi-gothic palette and writes in a painterly fashion: “He never pauses beside the heavy belly of a cow and, out of the crust of embarrassing dirt, tries to extract the sad, sweet secret which makes flesh fall from bones and heralds the blindness of our inescapable putrefaction.”

But it is for passages like these that I would reread this book:

“And he discovered that he was inferior to these men. They had had experience in every direction. At fourteen they had already mistaken the joys of Hell for the bliss of Paradise, and, later, stood again and again with empty hands in a completely illuminated world . . . Gustave envied them, not for their miserable experiences, but for the particular smell of reality which would never be his because he didn’t have the courage, wasn’t sufficiently carefree, to let himself be torn to shreds for no good reason.”

“He, Gustave, had seen him hanging in the thorny thicket of overpowering hellish hatred, at the mercy of a horrible heightening of his desires, a supernatural instrument of accumulated sterility, bursting upon all growing things like a shower of hail.”

and

“The futile expectations of a condemned creature are without parallel; the hope of being allowed to cross the saving threshold of a miracle is the bedfellow of the fear of death.”

There is no holding back in Jahnn’s writing and no pretense of modesty. The book is permeated with absolutes, characters laid bare, and confrontational statements about humankind and experience. It is bleak; but it is often wonderful.

[Andrew]

Rare is the genuinely weird and unsettling novel. This is one of them. You have the bureaucratic structures of Kafka (the supercargo!), the isolation of Coetzee’s protagonists, the… House of Leaves-ness… of House of Leaves. The ship moves slowly through the night. What is in that infinite cargo hold? And how long will the crew’s sanity hold out?

Or yours?

It will haunt you for days. I know it’s an obscurity, but why I hadn’t I read this already? And why haven’t you?

[Corto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting premise: A ship of anachronistic, arcane construction (hidden rooms, etc.) sets off on a year long journey with a mysterious cargo (and a standoffish, divisive supercargo aboard to accompany it). A stowaway hides in the hold to be with his fiancé (the captain's daughter).. Cabin doors can't lock. Strange footsteps and singing are heard in the night. Surveillance equipment is discovered. Rumors of start to fly. The protagonists start to question their grip on reality. (This last has a nice "In the Desert of the Tartars" feel.)

Then...it gets existential. There are ponderings, meanderings, deep conversations, and parables - some of which provide interesting moments.

......and ultimately, a passenger vanishes, which triggers the already paranoid crew and passengers.

I would've been fine with the ending, had I not learned that there is a sequel of sorts (not translated into English), which provides some resolution regarding a couple important loose ends. Knowing that there are answers out there leaves, me a little unsatisfied.

Recommended if you like dark, existential literature.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

In their opinion extraordinary things were about to take place on the quay

Hans Henny Jahnn was “the grandson of a shipbuilder, the son of a ship’s carpenter” so it is unsurprising that he managed to create such an awe-inspiring ship himself. The title gives away the importance of the ship, but it does nothing, in its simplicity, to indicate the presence that the ship will have, the monumental sense of malicious mystery that will enshroud it, and the dominating – crushing – impact it will have on its passengers. And the passages dedicated to the ship – both in its description and its exploration – really do stand out, and contribute mightily to the atmosphere and cryptic nature of the text.

And there are large mysteries at play here. The ship sits for weeks at the docks, towering over everything, silent, until one day it is loaded with crew and cargo. An incident surrounding the cargo occurs, which leads to the dismissal and replacement of almost the entire crew. The bulkhead holding the cargo is sealed – and the contents of the cargo is a constant source of conversation, consternation and speculation throughout the book – the cargo acts as a presence all on its own, influencing the crew, twisting their thoughts, and breeding discontent. The ship itself is a mystery – containing supposed hidden passages, crawlspaces under beds, mysterious locking mechanisms – that will bewilder the crew and the reader alike throughout the book. And then there is a disappearance.

"The miracles of life turn out to be preparation for a gigantic disillusionment and at the end stands old age. Extraordinary things are nothing but steps that lead to crime, and the corruption of the senses seems to be the order of the day."

The writing here, much like that in The Living Are Few, the Dead Many: Selected Works of Hans Henny Jahnn, is exquisitely dense, and completely unforgiving to anything but the most diligent of readings. As the story progress a surrealistic haze begins to envelop the characters and the narration, and at times plot points are revealed only through subtle insinuation, or in the midst of fever-dream-esque-hallucinations. But the writing is, in and of itself, one of the main reasons to lose oneself in this book. Every page contains rhetorical flourishes and oddities in abundance, and a writing style – and viewpoint – that is fairly unique to Jahnn.

The desecration of a corpse, the disrespect, the dismemberment of a silenced body, excused by the loneliness that had shattered him who was so sorely tired. […] a dead person was no personality but, rather, a thing fated to be destroyed, something to be erased from the public record. The lamented deceased was handed over to nurses, embalmers, gravediggers, and dissectors. No law protected him. He had no mouth any more with which to cry out, and perished in cremation or decomposition, defenseless, scorned, disposed of.

Of course, one of the main things this book does is frustrate me, because it only drives home how little of Jahnn’s writing is available in English. The aforementioned The Living Are Few, the Dead Many: Selected Works of Hans Henny Jahnn contains three excerpts from a larger work (Thirteen Uncanny Stories - which has also been translated but is out of print and completely goddamn unavailable) and one novella length story (The Night of Lead). And then there’s this book, and one of the three “excerpts” comes from this book, so the amount of available translated stuff from Jahnn is even less than it would initially appear. This is a wonderful, macabre, surrealistic book that needs a wider audience, in the hope that one day more of Jahnn’s stuff will be available here.

[Eugene · Rating 4 out of 5]

the intro namechecks both melville and giorgio de chirico and the book indeed is an odd combination of nautical metaphysics and surrealism's insidiously creepy emptying out.

an intense mystery story, not unlike the slow build-up of a bela tarr movie. in places it moves at a wild pace like a murder story's final confrontation or a chase scene; other times it lingers endlessly over each character's neurotics and guilt and anxiety--everyone in it an active raskolnikov. (and maybe the book is one long crime and punishment minus the denouement--just accusations and guilt.)

i did find myself a little struck by tedium midway through, waiting as the horror story set up itself--but then man, did i get walloped by the ending. it certainly leaves an impression...

and other than this overall, final and somewhat crushing impression, which is weighty and mysteriously achieved, the sentence-by-sentence style is what i think's also most memorable about it. (even so, it's a sum greater than its parts.) but here's but one early example:

"We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man--this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible--the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight" (p. 32).


found thankfully through will schofield's blog

[Tom Ghostly · Rating 5 out of 5]

marvelous, out of this world, the pinnacle of modern german-language literature (alongside kafka, musil, mann, maybe ransmayr, marianne fritz, michael lentz & a few others) …
even though „das holzschiff“ comes in just over 200 pages, it is not a book to speed through. it's so extraordinary you want to stop every 3 sentences, reread them & let them sink deep into you with your eyes closed. imagine kafka going completely nuts with baroque language & all kinds of discourses – it will give you a vague idea about this novel, nothing more. but on the other hand, reading the novel will give you nothing more than a vague idea either.
this is the kind of book you want to jump into without knowing much at all, so i'm not going to write about it in all detail, but maybe the following will arouse your interest:

there's a ship. a mysterious cargo on board, looking like sarcophagi. secret spaces & passages, even under beds, designed by a devilish shipowner, or maybe not. a missing person & several suspects in connection with it. the sound of footsteps, leading nowhere. & then someone calling out „gefahr“ / „danger“ below deck for no apparent reason …

technically, this is part 1 of a trilogy called „fluss ohne ufer“, however, only this part, „das holzschiff“, has been translated into english. you can totally read this novel as a standalone, as the follow-up, part 2, „die niederschrift des gustav anias horn …“, sets in decades later & is poetologically a completely different beast (which will alter your perception of the happenings in „das holzschiff“ nonetheless; please see my reviews about the other parts of the trilogy as well.)

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

But this frankness was like a clean cloth in the dark; no one could tell if anything had been spilled on it.

I had to check this book out of a nearby college library because it is out of print. I think nearly everybody on Goodreads who has read this neglected book was turned on to it initially by A Journey Round My Skull blog.

The book alternates between mysterious goings-on aboard a ship carrying coffin shaped cargo and circuitous thoughts within the characters' heads... "agonizing exertions" as Gustave puts it himself, full of paranoia, self doubt, moments of clarity, touching vulnerabilities, childish naivete, emotional outpourings, formal and/or ornate declarations, etc. etc.

The prose style is so unique, often the sentences are notable for their handsome bone structure, alternating between vague unknowns and specificity. I felt sea-sick the whole time.

Yes, it is laborious at points, especially in the middle when you have no idea where all this is leading, but the ending more than makes up for it.

Waldemar Strunck thought of his home and the joy of his loins.

[Thomas Hübner · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=592

The wooden ship is the talk of the town. When the beautiful large three-master arrives at the unnamed port (maybe Hamburg, the author's home city), the citizens are more than a bit puzzled. The wooden ship is all teak and oak and it looks much too elegant to be an ordinary freighter. (Hans Henny Jahnn, the author of The Ship, was not only a famous organ-builder but also the son of a ship carpenter, which helped him to make the description of the ship so convincing.)

Unknown cargo is unloaded, the owner is dismissing the crew and leaving just two guards (with whom he drinks almost every night on the ship). After a while a new crew is hired and under the supervision of a person who is referred to as the Supercargo - later we learn that his real name is Georg Lauffer - , the new cargo is being carried to ship without further investigation by the customs.

And here, at the latest, it dawns on the reader that something must be wrong with the ship: neither the content of the coffin-shaped crates nor the destination of the ship are known to the crew or even the captain, and during the process of carrying the crates it comes to an eruption of violence from the side of the Supercargo. The reasons why he lets part of the crew to be beaten up are not exactly clear, but as a result part of the sailors are dismissed and replaced by seamen who will not ask questions and who will stay away from the mysterious cargo.

These events give the author an opportunity to make the reader familiar with his opinions about life in general:

"A human being who has suffered a disappointment turns to the laws of physics. A child who has just burned himself with a glowing red ember, tries, cautiously, to see if a stick of red sealing wax will injure him in the same way. And if Providence intends to give him a thorough knowledge of life, she lets him make the same test at regular intervals. And perhaps he will gain the knowledge that the red stuff—which is apparently always the same—is sometimes hot, and sometimes cool. And a small corner of the veil of What Happens if lifted. He looks into the abyss of causality and can see the face of time as a reflection of eternity. Certainty becomes questionable, the riddle more powerful than knowledge. He will no longer trust the chance that might burn him."

"And a wave of primitive remembrance came over them, the beginning of all thought and its magical expiration, which came out of the darkness of the room. Laws, still unclear which must therefore have been repealed. Metals, malleable as wax, melted in fire and not congealed. Wood as pliable as a reed. Bodies that have no weight, no face. Stones that can float. Magnetic mountains. A reversal of the senses. The vast kingdom of the unreliable."

"The lights were on in the great sky dome, flickering in infinite space. Their cold glow, uplifting the heart or destroying it, conveyed the deceptive marvel of edifying ideas. Millions of human beings—and who knows if the animals don’t do the same thing—look up at the night with uncomprehending eyes and turn inward to a forlorn or frightened breast, their own. They see themselves as chosen or rejected. Or what is far away is as far away for them as it pretends to be. It does not penetrate the miasma of their martyred blood. And then again storms spread their noise across the vapors of the earth. Now it was the gleaming dew of loneliness that trickled down upon it."

"Just as the pit of a mine was a hollow amid rock, a ship was a hole in the water in which lungs could breath. A human being had to fear mountains and water."

"The conclusion is inescapable that he must have been jammed into the space or sucked up. The wall has to be there."

"We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man—this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible—the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight."

"The miracles of life turn out to be preparation for a gigantic disillusionment and at the end stands old age. Extraordinary things are nothing but steps that lead to crime, and the corruption of the senses seems to be the order of the day."

"When we begin to think… we are more naked than at birth and more helpless. And we are strangled in the noose of the shriveling umbilical cord."

The captain of the ship, Waldemar Strunk, is bringing his daughter Ellena on board, because he doesn't want to leave her alone at home. Her fiance Gustav Horn decides to come on board as a stowaway. When the ship is leaving port, the owner is mysteriously missing, and Gustav and Ellena are suspecting that for some unknown reason the owner might also be on board as a stowaway.

The ship is becoming more and more a mystery to the passengers and the crew. While Ellena and Gustav are in Ellena's cabin, they realize that the lock is not working properly, and thus the secret of Gustav is uncovered by the Supercargo. After it is officially known that Ellena's fiancee is on board, Gustav is walking around on board and makes the acquaintance of the crew. Some characters, like the cook, the ship's carpenter Klemens Fitte, and the youngest sailor Alfred Tutein (who whispers on several occasions "Danger!" into Gustav's ear) are introduced more closely. Between Gustav and Tutein there seems to grow a strange mutual attraction, although we readers can only guess the nature of this obvious attraction.

Gustav, the main figure of the novel, is listening full of fascination to the stories of the primitive, vital and virile sailors. This is a simple world where the men are following their animal instincts, a world that is completely new to the educated Gustav.

"And he discovered that he was inferior to these men. They had had experience in every direction. At fourteen they had already mistaken the joys of Hell for the bliss of Paradise, and, later, stood again and again with empty hands in a completely illuminated world . . . Gustave envied them, not for their miserable experiences, but for the particular smell of reality which would never be his because he didn’t have the courage, wasn’t sufficiently carefree, to let himself be torn to shreds for no good reason."

At the same time, some process of estrangement seems to take place between Gustav and Ellena, who is meeting the Supercargo several times without Gustav's knowledge. Gustav becomes jealous when he realizes that his fiancee has secret conversations with Lauffer, because he is suspecting that there is much more to them than Ellena wants to make him believe.

"'You are suffering,' she said simply. 'Why?'

'I can present my parables in a different connection or in a different order,' he said. 'Millions of ears hear the magical sound of universal sadness, true or false, and fall prey to it. There exists only one pain, one passion, on death. But they glitter limitlessly in infinity, in motion everywhere. And every ray, the known and the unknown, hums this consuming rhythm, this melody of downfall. He who lays himself open to it founders, goes up in flames, succumbs. Perhaps the greatest work of art is the masterpiece of omnipotence which is everywhere with a soft voice. And we, its servants, are being summoned to all things at every moment. But often we refuse. We shut ourselves off. But when are we so completely healthy or invulnerable that pain cannot reach us? When could we call ourselves out of the reach of death? Where is there peace and justice, a condition without condemnation, that we could let sadness go from us with impunity?'

'That is a theory of how suffering spreads on this earth, from the stars or from somewhere or other.'

'But I don't want it that way,' he said. 'I want to experience everything but I want to remain as virtuous as matter, which is unaware of its own manifestations. I want to stand at my own side when I scream or sink to the ground in convulsions. I am not prepared to let myself be put on trial as to whether I am a useful or an objectionable male animal. I have come into being and intend to make myself at home in the condition as I please. I don't escape the voice, I swing and twitch with it, but I don't want to feel it as everybody else feels it.'

'You are crying.' The words come from her forced.

'I know,' he said. 'But it doesn't mean anything to me.' "

Things are escalating quickly after the illiterate carpenter Klemens Fitte, the son of a prostitute, is telling one of the strangest stories you will ever read in your life: the story of Kebad Kenya, a man who wants to be buried alive and who makes his neighbors who will inherit his big fortune kill his favorite horse without any apparent reason.

"After all, it was his intention to die without the help of death, and the effort to become motionless and cold took every ounce of his vigilance and strength."

The story of Kebad Kenya leads the sailors to suspect that the coffin-shaped crates contain dead (or living) human bodies and they rush to break into the cargo room and open the first crate that proves surprisingly to be empty.

Ellena disappears suddenly after a visit at the Supercargo's cabin. Is she hiding in the ship? Has she jumped over board? Was she killed - and by whom? A search is started during which the ship is so damaged that it is sinking and the crew has to be evacuated. Most of them will be saved by an approaching ship, but Ellena's fate remains a secret and mystery.

"Then it was over. They climbed across the cargo toward the door by which they had entered. Gustav, in a last effort to come closer to the content of the cargo, threw himself down on one of the coffin-like crates. He made the effort, even if with dwindling will power and filled with a premonition of futility, to establish some sort of relationship with the mysterious thing. It seemed foolish to him, an error of human perception, that anything could remain hidden which could be approached until only a few centimeters lay between. But it was the usual thing to be struck with blindness. Who could recognize the sickness of his neighbor with his eyes even though it lay palpable under the skin? When Gustav arose from the crate a few seconds later, he had assured himself that the icy aura which filled the hold had infected the crates or, perhaps, they were its sources. He felt as if he had thrown himself down on the snows of a wintry field. And a white wraith of cold crept up to him."

This lengthy synopsis doesn't answer the question what happened to Ellena because The Ship (the title should be The Wooden Ship - in German it is Das Holzschiff and not Das Schiff) is just the overture to a true monster of a novel. Fluss ohne Ufer (River Without Banks) has about 2500 pages of which only the first part is translated into English.

True, The Ship is a stand-alone novel. But still it is such a pity that this great and in many ways unique novel is not available in English. (It has been translated to French though).

It's author, Hans Henny Jahnn, was a unique figure, and the book is unlike any other book you will come across during your life. In a way, it is devastating and it might be one of these books that have the potential to change your life.

In Jahnn's world there is no God, no metaphysics. Traditional concepts of moral, guilt, progress, are rejected. Man is not superior to the rest of the creatures, the animal is his equal and in many ways even superior. (Jahnn was an early advocate of animal rights and also a leading figure in the movement against nuclear arms).

That Jahnn's novels, plays and stories are full of controversial topics like sado-masochism, homo- and bi-sexuality, incest and others that will repel a part of the readership, did not exactly help his popularity. But this is a pity, because despite all that, Jahnn is such a great author. Other reasons why Jahnn is not popular were given by literary critic Ulrich Greiner in his essay "The seven deadly sins of Hans Henny Jahnn". He writes:

"There is no consolation. "It is what it is, and it is terrible." No God is conceivable, enlightenment a fiasco, reason only a flatus vocis, progress a catastrophic joke. No matter in which direction Jahnn thinks, no matter which way his painful heroes are pursuing, no matter which vision is lighting up in the moment: the aporia is indissoluble, the novel cannot be concluded, the artistic effort a failure. At the end, there is only darkness. That leaves a bitter taste. This is not very digestible."

Many of the mysteries of The Ship are uncovered in the untranslated part of River Without Banks. Where is the publisher that makes this masterpiece that has no similarity to any other novel, available to anglophone readers?

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

JESUS CHRIST. What an oppressive, suffocating little beast this novel is, reading like a black, frenzied collaboration of Kafka and Lautréamont, paranoid and compelling one instant, exploding suddenly into a surreal, nightmarish phantasmagoria the next. Profoundly unsettling, disgusting, breathless, and mysterious. Written in 1936, in Germany. Wonder if that has anything to do with it. It seems very few people know of this book's existence. Thank G-d for Peter Owen Publishers for unearthing it. I am not joking: the final 20 pages of this book gave me CHEST PAINS. If I end up having a myocardial infarction from this shit I don't even think I'll regret it.

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting. Comparisons to Soupault, Blackwood and de Chirico could be made.

[Vitschne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schon jetzt ganz klar mein Buch des Jahres! Packend, unheimlich, treibt dich an den Rand der menschlichen Existenz, Parabel auf das Leben, eine der größten literarischen Entdeckungen

[Thomas Hübner · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=592

The wooden ship is the talk of the town. When the beautiful large three-master arrives at the unnamed port (maybe Hamburg, the author's home city), the citizens are more than a bit puzzled. The wooden ship is all teak and oak and it looks much too elegant to be an ordinary freighter. (Hans Henny Jahnn, the author of The Ship, was not only a famous organ-builder but also the son of a ship carpenter, which helped him to make the description of the ship so convincing.)

Unknown cargo is unloaded, the owner is dismissing the crew and leaving just two guards (with whom he drinks almost every night on the ship). After a while a new crew is hired and under the supervision of a person who is referred to as the Supercargo - later we learn that his real name is Georg Lauffer - , the new cargo is being carried to ship without further investigation by the customs.

And here, at the latest, it dawns on the reader that something must be wrong with the ship: neither the content of the coffin-shaped crates nor the destination of the ship are known to the crew or even the captain, and during the process of carrying the crates it comes to an eruption of violence from the side of the Supercargo. The reasons why he lets part of the crew to be beaten up are not exactly clear, but as a result part of the sailors are dismissed and replaced by seamen who will not ask questions and who will stay away from the mysterious cargo.

These events give the author an opportunity to make the reader familiar with his opinions about life in general:

"A human being who has suffered a disappointment turns to the laws of physics. A child who has just burned himself with a glowing red ember, tries, cautiously, to see if a stick of red sealing wax will injure him in the same way. And if Providence intends to give him a thorough knowledge of life, she lets him make the same test at regular intervals. And perhaps he will gain the knowledge that the red stuff—which is apparently always the same—is sometimes hot, and sometimes cool. And a small corner of the veil of What Happens if lifted. He looks into the abyss of causality and can see the face of time as a reflection of eternity. Certainty becomes questionable, the riddle more powerful than knowledge. He will no longer trust the chance that might burn him."

"And a wave of primitive remembrance came over them, the beginning of all thought and its magical expiration, which came out of the darkness of the room. Laws, still unclear which must therefore have been repealed. Metals, malleable as wax, melted in fire and not congealed. Wood as pliable as a reed. Bodies that have no weight, no face. Stones that can float. Magnetic mountains. A reversal of the senses. The vast kingdom of the unreliable."

"The lights were on in the great sky dome, flickering in infinite space. Their cold glow, uplifting the heart or destroying it, conveyed the deceptive marvel of edifying ideas. Millions of human beings—and who knows if the animals don’t do the same thing—look up at the night with uncomprehending eyes and turn inward to a forlorn or frightened breast, their own. They see themselves as chosen or rejected. Or what is far away is as far away for them as it pretends to be. It does not penetrate the miasma of their martyred blood. And then again storms spread their noise across the vapors of the earth. Now it was the gleaming dew of loneliness that trickled down upon it."

"Just as the pit of a mine was a hollow amid rock, a ship was a hole in the water in which lungs could breath. A human being had to fear mountains and water."

"The conclusion is inescapable that he must have been jammed into the space or sucked up. The wall has to be there."

"We have witnessed the horrible again and again, a transformation no one could foresee. A healthy body is run over by a truck, crushed. Blood, once secreted, once feeling its way blindly through the body, pulsating in a meshwork of thin streams, spreading the chemically charged hormones and their mysterious functions like a red tree inside man—this blood now runs out shapelesssly in great puddles. And still no one grasps that, in a network of veins, it has form. But even more horrible—the death struggle itself, in which the innumerable organs, which we believe we feel, take part. Terror is stronger in us than delight."

"The miracles of life turn out to be preparation for a gigantic disillusionment and at the end stands old age. Extraordinary things are nothing but steps that lead to crime, and the corruption of the senses seems to be the order of the day."

"When we begin to think… we are more naked than at birth and more helpless. And we are strangled in the noose of the shriveling umbilical cord."

The captain of the ship, Waldemar Strunk, is bringing his daughter Ellena on board, because he doesn't want to leave her alone at home. Her fiance Gustav Horn decides to come on board as a stowaway. When the ship is leaving port, the owner is mysteriously missing, and Gustav and Ellena are suspecting that for some unknown reason the owner might also be on board as a stowaway.

The ship is becoming more and more a mystery to the passengers and the crew. While Ellena and Gustav are in Ellena's cabin, they realize that the lock is not working properly, and thus the secret of Gustav is uncovered by the Supercargo. After it is officially known that Ellena's fiancee is on board, Gustav is walking around on board and makes the acquaintance of the crew. Some characters, like the cook, the ship's carpenter Klemens Fitte, and the youngest sailor Alfred Tutein (who whispers on several occasions "Danger!" into Gustav's ear) are introduced more closely. Between Gustav and Tutein there seems to grow a strange mutual attraction, although we readers can only guess the nature of this obvious attraction.

Gustav, the main figure of the novel, is listening full of fascination to the stories of the primitive, vital and virile sailors. This is a simple world where the men are following their animal instincts, a world that is completely new to the educated Gustav.

"And he discovered that he was inferior to these men. They had had experience in every direction. At fourteen they had already mistaken the joys of Hell for the bliss of Paradise, and, later, stood again and again with empty hands in a completely illuminated world . . . Gustave envied them, not for their miserable experiences, but for the particular smell of reality which would never be his because he didn’t have the courage, wasn’t sufficiently carefree, to let himself be torn to shreds for no good reason."

At the same time, some process of estrangement seems to take place between Gustav and Ellena, who is meeting the Supercargo several times without Gustav's knowledge. Gustav becomes jealous when he realizes that his fiancee has secret conversations with Lauffer, because he is suspecting that there is much more to them than Ellena wants to make him believe.

"'You are suffering,' she said simply. 'Why?'

'I can present my parables in a different connection or in a different order,' he said. 'Millions of ears hear the magical sound of universal sadness, true or false, and fall prey to it. There exists only one pain, one passion, on death. But they glitter limitlessly in infinity, in motion everywhere. And every ray, the known and the unknown, hums this consuming rhythm, this melody of downfall. He who lays himself open to it founders, goes up in flames, succumbs. Perhaps the greatest work of art is the masterpiece of omnipotence which is everywhere with a soft voice. And we, its servants, are being summoned to all things at every moment. But often we refuse. We shut ourselves off. But when are we so completely healthy or invulnerable that pain cannot reach us? When could we call ourselves out of the reach of death? Where is there peace and justice, a condition without condemnation, that we could let sadness go from us with impunity?'

'That is a theory of how suffering spreads on this earth, from the stars or from somewhere or other.'

'But I don't want it that way,' he said. 'I want to experience everything but I want to remain as virtuous as matter, which is unaware of its own manifestations. I want to stand at my own side when I scream or sink to the ground in convulsions. I am not prepared to let myself be put on trial as to whether I am a useful or an objectionable male animal. I have come into being and intend to make myself at home in the condition as I please. I don't escape the voice, I swing and twitch with it, but I don't want to feel it as everybody else feels it.'

'You are crying.' The words come from her forced.

'I know,' he said. 'But it doesn't mean anything to me.' "

Things are escalating quickly after the illiterate carpenter Klemens Fitte, the son of a prostitute, is telling one of the strangest stories you will ever read in your life: the story of Kebad Kenya, a man who wants to be buried alive and who makes his neighbors who will inherit his big fortune kill his favorite horse without any apparent reason.

"After all, it was his intention to die without the help of death, and the effort to become motionless and cold took every ounce of his vigilance and strength."

The story of Kebad Kenya leads the sailors to suspect that the coffin-shaped crates contain dead (or living) human bodies and they rush to break into the cargo room and open the first crate that proves surprisingly to be empty.

Ellena disappears suddenly after a visit at the Supercargo's cabin. Is she hiding in the ship? Has she jumped over board? Was she killed - and by whom? A search is started during which the ship is so damaged that it is sinking and the crew has to be evacuated. Most of them will be saved by an approaching ship, but Ellena's fate remains a secret and mystery.

"Then it was over. They climbed across the cargo toward the door by which they had entered. Gustav, in a last effort to come closer to the content of the cargo, threw himself down on one of the coffin-like crates. He made the effort, even if with dwindling will power and filled with a premonition of futility, to establish some sort of relationship with the mysterious thing. It seemed foolish to him, an error of human perception, that anything could remain hidden which could be approached until only a few centimeters lay between. But it was the usual thing to be struck with blindness. Who could recognize the sickness of his neighbor with his eyes even though it lay palpable under the skin? When Gustav arose from the crate a few seconds later, he had assured himself that the icy aura which filled the hold had infected the crates or, perhaps, they were its sources. He felt as if he had thrown himself down on the snows of a wintry field. And a white wraith of cold crept up to him."

This lengthy synopsis doesn't answer the question what happened to Ellena because The Ship (the title should be The Wooden Ship - in German it is Das Holzschiff and not Das Schiff) is just the overture to a true monster of a novel. Fluss ohne Ufer (River Without Banks) has about 2500 pages of which only the first part is translated into English.

True, The Ship is a stand-alone novel. But still it is such a pity that this great and in many ways unique novel is not available in English. (It has been translated to French though).

It's author, Hans Henny Jahnn, was a unique figure, and the book is unlike any other book you will come across during your life. In a way, it is devastating and it might be one of these books that have the potential to change your life.

In Jahnn's world there is no God, no metaphysics. Traditional concepts of moral, guilt, progress, are rejected. Man is not superior to the rest of the creatures, the animal is his equal and in many ways even superior. (Jahnn was an early advocate of animal rights and also a leading figure in the movement against nuclear arms).

That Jahnn's novels, plays and stories are full of controversial topics like sado-masochism, homo- and bi-sexuality, incest and others that will repel a part of the readership, did not exactly help his popularity. But this is a pity, because despite all that, Jahnn is such a great author. Other reasons why Jahnn is not popular were given by literary critic Ulrich Greiner in his essay "The seven deadly sins of Hans Henny Jahnn". He writes:

"There is no consolation. "It is what it is, and it is terrible." No God is conceivable, enlightenment a fiasco, reason only a flatus vocis, progress a catastrophic joke. No matter in which direction Jahnn thinks, no matter which way his painful heroes are pursuing, no matter which vision is lighting up in the moment: the aporia is indissoluble, the novel cannot be concluded, the artistic effort a failure. At the end, there is only darkness. That leaves a bitter taste. This is not very digestible."

Many of the mysteries of The Ship are uncovered in the untranslated part of River Without Banks. Where is the publisher that makes this masterpiece that has no similarity to any other novel, available to anglophone readers?

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hans Henny Jahnn ist so einer der Namen, die man kennt aber nie gelesen hat...

Aber dann ein Werk mit geradezu herausragenden 4.08 Sternen bei 200 Reviews, die allerdings fast alle von einer englischen Ausgabe stammen. Den Reviews zu Folge handelt es sich um eine Kafkaesque zur See mit herausragend klarer Sprache.

Nun ja... Zur See ist schon einmal richtig. Ein mysteriöser Reeder lässt eines der letzten großen Segelschiffe bauen und als es endlich zur See fährt tauschen lauter Rätsel auf. Ladung und Fahrtziel werden vor Kapitän und Besatzung geheim gehalten. Überall Geheimgänge und ein Frachtmanager, der alle abhört. Ein blinder Passagier oder doch zwei, eine Frau die verschwindet und eine Besatzung, die langsam dem Wahnsinn verfällt. Guter Stoff für ein Buch, leider in einer seltsam behäbigen Erzählweise und hölzernen Sprache. Kurz gesagt der englische Übersetzer muss dem Werk mehr Qualität verliehen haben, als es in sich trug. Es ist keine Kafkaesque, es ist B. Traven. B. Traven oder Jack London.

Das ist nicht schlecht aber eben keine Weltliteratur, sondern ein zu recht verstaubter Abenteuerroman.

[Fabi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein archaisches Segelschiff mit labyrinthartigen, sinnlosen Gängen fährt mit unbekannter Ladung zu einem Unbekannten Ort und irgendwann verschwindet die Verlobte eines blinden Passagiers spurlos während alles immer paranoider und mysteriöser wird.
Hatte am Anfang etwas Schwierigkeiten mit dem expressionistischem Stil, die sich aber schnell gelegt haben. Wirklich wunderschön geschrieben mit vielen Allegorien und kreativen Bildern und kafkaesken vibes. Thematisch wird so viel so gut verhandelt zwischen Begehren, Phantasien, Geschlechterverhältnissen und Rassismus.
Definitiv eines meiner Lieblingsbücher und ich bin gespannt auf mehr von Jahnn!

[Iohannes · Rating 4 out of 5]

rly enjoyed this. dark and gloomy atmosphere spiked with some cosmic pessism a la Schopenhauer; also has some rly gorgeous prose passages - def recommended.

[Rob Adey]

This was a recommendation in Steve Aylett's Heart of the Original. You can see why as it's deeply weird and has a chef in it. The rhythm of the writing is very similar to Aylett's; maybe it was a big influence.

It's a sort of House of Leaves/Sapphire and Steel episode at sea, which in theory I'd love but in practice is way too cryptic to grab me. I ditched it halfway.

[Sam Pulham · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can listen to an in-depth conversation about Hans Henny Jahnn's 'The Ship' on Sherds Podcast: http://www.holdfastnetwork.com/sherds...

[Andres Besada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horror psicológico mezclado con novela del mar. Super recomendable, la trama te lleva por todo el barco y no te suelta hasta el fin.

[Joseph M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grotesque but also... strangely heartwarming at parts? Of course, it all depends on how much strangely worded interior monologue you are up for, not the least to mention how much german Expressionist-flavored horror turned mystery novel you are ready to stomach.

The book is curious, in that it is narrated in third-person omniscient but this third person narrator really gets into the feelings of the, kind-of, "main character" here, Gustave. He is a stowaway on a ship because he does not want to leave his loved one, Ellena, before their wedding. Now, this is just the setup, so I won't spoil any more. I think I love mystery novels done like this, and at times of the book, the plot development is so vague and wrapped in the mist of purple-prose that you can't really tell what is happening in the mystery. I won't spoil more than I've already probably spoiled.

Regarding the themes, it seems a very roundabout meditation on sexuality and gender. In many ways Gustave is the 'ideal' faithful and kind, model-husband to Ellena. However, because of the circumstances of the ship, he intermingles with the lusty sailors who provide the seemingly opposite model of traditional maleness, hardy and reckless. The mysterious and scary circumstances of the ship bring these men together, and I see it as Jahnn trying to reckon not only with feelings of sexual shame (wrapped up in what might be easily called Jahnn's "pessimism" if one isn't discriminating of the themes enough) but also with struggling with traditional hegemonic masculinity. It's enough that this exploration was enough for Jahnn, but there are times I can't help but feel the women, once again, are stereotyped as passive and emotional. Still, it's very much a step in the right direction even if it takes a couple of steps back, because Ellena's interior monologues are presented with enough grace and sympathy as the male characters (even if her dialogue is not as well written). There is a striking part of the book where Gustave and Ellena are embracing and they are said to have temporarily forgotten their gender roles.

There is also the sense of being caught up in a conspiracy not of your own making, which now you have to contend with. There is the obvious historical connection to the awful crimes of Germany during World War II that German citizens had to come to terms with, whether or not they "intentionally" or "actively" participated in the rise of Nazism. I don't quite feel comfortable reducing the whole book to this historical connection, but I'll leave it up to you whether or not you want to chalk that up to be the "big" theme of the book. Nonetheless, like any work of literature or art in general, this is a complex and multi-faceted exploration, that doesn't pretend to have answers. It's simply probing the area of pain for a disease without a cure at the time. It's painful at times, and complex, so it can't be reduced easily to any themes. It's not one of Aesop's fables.

[Roger Boyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know how I came by this - perhaps Ginger John sent it to me (seems very plausible).

It's hard to rate this; it's a difficult book to read but getting from page to page is easy enough. What's it about? It's an allegory for ... something. The role(s) of men as they interact? The only woman in the book "disappears" and may have been murdered and may have been raped, and may not. As the preface says: "reading this book is like listening to the silence in public squares".

I'm glad I read it: if nothing else it's an insight into modern German literature in the inter-war years. It's the first of an unfinished trilogy, and I can live with the other two not existing. I suspect it was very hard to translate, and from time to time that is clear.

Hmmmm.

[Brett Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to finish this book in about a week because I was only able to find it through ILL. I wish I had about four weeks to read it because this book is driven off symbolism and raw descriptions of human emotions. So much so that the actual setting becomes rather meaningless towards the end of the novel.

The writing is so involving that despite somewhat murky passages it compels you forward through the story. The author has a curious habit of slipping in these nostalgic, nature-filed paragraphs to describe the endless layers of a feeling or a stage in a characters life life.

Contrary to the title, It is certainly not a sea story, but a novel that will reveal itself more and more after every reading.

[Guillaume · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si la littérature du XXème siècle, pourquoi pas labyrinthique, psychologique, métaphysique, est votre dada. Que vous aimez Melville, Conrad et Kafka. Alors ce Navire de Bois sera pour vous le chef d'oeuvre oublié du siècle dernier. Presque étourdissant pour le commun des mortels je pense. De mon côté j'ai mis une semaine à venir à bout de ces presque 200 pages (sans lire tous les soirs), faut être d'attaque.

[Camille Mstr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un livre très riche, dense, baroque, tant au niveau de l'écriture que des thèmes abordés. Le genre de livre que j'aurais aimé lire dans le cadre d'un cours pour bien en saisir toutes les nuances de sens.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

strange

[Henrik · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Træskibet” !!!!!!!!!